Workplace reviews and discussion: 詮采科技有限公司

There are some snacks. The boss occasionally cooks something, and he’s quite good at it, but he may not necessarily invite all employees to try it!

1. The supervisor in Kaohsiung is Malaysian and originally also worked in Taipei. At that time, work started at 8:30, and meetings began punctually at 8:30 every day. There were meetings every day; if you were five minutes late, the leave form would be thrown onto your desk. No overtime pay!

2. Unless it was discussed and agreed upon during the interview, the year-end bonus is only ten NT$100 bills!

3. Whenever the boss feels like it, he calls one or two employees to his room to “chat.” The chats last one or two hours. He calls people from the same department in batches, making it very clear which batch consists of the boss’s confidants and which ones are…

4. The company has only 12 employees, but 104 says there are 70, counting outsourced factories as well. Every time they recruit on 104, there are more than a dozen openings, making people think the company has a lot of room for development!

5. Whenever an important client visits, the boss’s daughter is told to sit in an empty seat to make up the headcount!

6. During the year and a half I was there, at least 10 people who joined after me were laid off not long afterward!

7. What’s even more amazing is that one or two of those who were laid off were still asked to work part-time.

8. The funniest thing I’ve seen: an assistant sales administrator was laid off at noon on their first day at work because they typed using only two fingers!

9. The circuit designs and component values of 95% of the products are identical. The PCBs are all laid out by the boss. The boss lays out PCBs extremely quickly—at a professional PCB layout speed—and often gets them almost to the final stage before telling you, “I only spent three days on the layout; you have three days to organize it.” When you get the files, you’ll feel like crying. They don’t follow IC layout rules, so you have to take them apart and reorganize them; it takes at least a week!

10. Therefore, even though the circuits and component values are identical, they test very differently, and then you’re blamed for not knowing how to debug.

11. They organize two or three employee trips a year, spanning workdays and holidays, consuming your annual leave. If you don’t go, you have to take leave!

12. There are no Dragon Boat Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival bonuses, the year-end bonus is poor, and they even hold employee gift exchanges at year-end!

13. Whenever you fix a bug in an existing product, the boss gives you a “Give Me Five” on the spot. The next day, he is sure to gather all the employees and talk a bunch of nonsense. After listening, you immediately know he is putting pressure on you because your achievements have made him feel threatened!

14. There’s no need to talk about promotions at a company with 14 employees!

15. The products use SMPS, but their architecture differs somewhat from that used by professional power-supply companies. You won’t be able to use this experience after leaving, and there are very few companies with similar work!